I feel like he has the right idea but the concept of "risk", I feel, is pretty worthless when you've probably got a few hundred million in the bank. In fact, it upsets me in general when filthy rich people talk about risk, because I have a mortgage and a family so for me, "risk" means maybe not being able to put a roof over my son's head.
Do you think he was born with a few hundred million in the bank? He eschewed all the standard hip hop trappings and didn't go all 'gangsta' when that's how people made money. When he produced The Blueprint (one of the greatest hip hop albums ever made) it was backed by soul beats which just weren't a thing in ~2000. He's always done his own thing, his latest album is a prime example of that. He's still just putting out shit he wants to listen to, not necessarily putting out what's successful at any given time in the industry.
It's easy to look back and say, you're filthy rich now so you aren't actually taking risks, but taking risks is how he got there.
For the record there were 'soul beats' long before Kanye. Ghostface has been using that style since the 90s. In fact Kanye has been biting off Ghost since the beginning and has been called out for such.
Lots of artists didn't 'go all gangsta' to make it. He isn't the first or the last.
The Blueprint being one of the greatest hip hop albums ever made is also highly debatable.
His newest album is an example of this as well. Ghostface has had a cult following but limited wide appeal. Death Grips gained a cult following in the past 1.5 years, and much of Yeezus sounds like a bad Death Grips album.
Claiming that soul beats weren't a thing in 2000 hip-hop is silly. Released in '99: Mos Def's Black on Both Sides, the Roots' Things Fall Apart. Hip hop started with soul beats, and soul has always been a part of hip-hop.
Mos Def is also a great example of someone who 'didn't go all gangsta' to make it. The statement that 'going all gangsta when thats how people made money' is really illustrative of a certain ignorance about hip hop and sadly one that is widely held. It was one route yes but many artists did not follow it.
Edit: Removed part of comment that may have sounded overly negative.
+1. He could have churned out album after album in his trademark 'soul' style but he places it all on the line with each album just to mix it up and push boundaries. He's a great artist.
When you have more it is more scary to take a risk as you are risking everything you have. How I relate to it is this way, I have a fairly good paying job (equivalent to Kanye releasing albums what's popular) versus I solve a hard problem and quit my day job to build it (similar to Kanye sticks to what he believes in). Now you do the math who has more to loose?
Having said that, I'm going through a stage in my life where I am getting to see the real character of people in terms of their risk appetite. Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur but when it really comes to doing it people chicken out. May be it's my circle but again that's my experience.
It is mere coincidence, however, that the music he wanted to make was also the music people wanted to hear. It's hardly laudable to do something you enjoy...
Also... Media Hype Machine. He's made himself into a symbol. For all most people (who follow his antics) care his next album could be 'Pip farting on a snare drum' to take a line from Air Heads.
I don't think thats really true at all. His music is looked at very critically, because he pushes a lot of boundaries and he is such an outspoken character. People love to hate him, so the fact that his music is so acclaimed is evidence of just how good it is, that many people like it despite his antics.
I think you're counting a vocal minority and discounting a large pop music buying populace.
Also his music is pretty derivative if you've heard the music he is 'biting' or 'paying homage to' or what have you. I'd hesitate to call it pushing boundries as much as it is introducing it into the pop music lexicon.
Also people like The Kardashians despite their antics does that make them good... What is it they do again?
Read the interview. You've got it all wrong. He actually says the risky thing for him to do is to not to anything. It has nothing to do with money. I'm sure he fully understands that he could sit on his bank account for the rest of his life, check out and not do anything. His risk isn't losing his home. It's a different kind of risk.
He stresses that the most important thing to him is actually having ideas and sharing them with the world. He says this over and over again, and I can't help but believe him.
> The risk for me would be in not taking one — that's the only thing that's really risky for me.
Kanye's very fortunate that "having ideas" are "the only thing that's really risky for me."
Personally I don't find a lot of value in his "ideas" nor do I agree that he's risking very much. For all his nonsense about liberation from evil, he seems hellbent on integrating himself with the fashion world.
So how does that compare to start ups that usually require vast actual risks from their founders?
His risk is sort of a philosophical/existential risk. Not what many would consider an 'actual' risk to himself. This really does seem to be a function of the fact that he is rich and a celebrity.
He wasn't born a celebrity millionaire. He dropped out of college (scholarship, and his mother was a professor there who didn't approve) to pursuit a career in music, took him a decade to break out.
The interesting thing though about most successful rappers is that, while almost all of them come from poverty, they tend to achieve success early in life such that by the time they hit middle age they've been rich longer than they've been poor (Nas notes this in one of his songs)...
A guy like Jay-Z talking about hardship increasingly sounds out of touch :)
If his mom was a professor at a college that sounds like an indication of at least an upper middle class upbringing.
Edit: Wikipedia says, "middle class" and the college he dropped out of was an art school so it isn't like he was giving up a sure thing to take a course that was more risky.
Single mother in Chicago working at a state college? Straight up middle class.
I don't buy the premise that you need to be poor to have an appreciation of risk. Risk isn't just financial, there is also career and personal risk. Think of all the well-off kids who didn't follow in their fathers footsteps or what their parents wanted and pursued their own dreams, at the risk of being alienated, disowned etc.
He wasn't at risk of being disowned. He also wasn't at risk of going hungry. He may have been at risk of having to work a boring 9-5 for the rest of his life. But that's a risk shared by so much of the public that it seems pretty minimal.
acronO that's the trap that a LOT of people fall into so you're not alone. But don't go to the grave realizing your decisions were based on making a mortgage payment or a 401K payment or a retirement payment or a college savings plan or a something other very "sensible" sounding. Trust me, your boy is going to love and remember his Dad way more if he saw him doing something he was passionate about and lived in a rental than living in a mortgaged house with a bigger room and a Dad with no spark.
Besides what others said about him not always being rich, there is more to risk than money. Doing something crazy on TV or coming out with an album nobody likes could make hundreds of millions of people think differently of him, say he is going downhill, whatever. That is pretty risky as far as I'm concerned.
I know them as much as the comment above me knows Kanye. Being an asshole is a public persona, and each of those people has been called or referred to as an asshole.
edit: and there are plenty of anecdotal "Kanye is a nice guy when you meet him" stories as well. Evel Knievel sued Kanye and described him as 'vulgar an offensive', after they met he said "I thought he was a wonderful guy and a gentleman":
Laughing at 'Bill Gates is an asshole.' I've heard this anecdotally about everyone on your list, but not about him. People malign Microsoft and Windows, but please show me anecdotes about Gates the person being an asshole.
You haven't been around the tech scene long have you? Gates has a well-known reputation within MS as ruthless, snarky, and yes an asshole at times. See the numerous references to his (famous if only anecdotal) refrains when unsatisfied with someone else's work.
Also read Paul Allen's book -- specifically the part where Gates tried to screw Paul by diluting his stock.
Throughout the netscape vs IE era, Gates was considered a ruthless businessman internationally. The situation is 10 years old and fading, but asshole was definitely a predominant take on Gates for a long time
I respect you a lot and you sure have more information than most of us. But Mr. Zuckerberg called "dumb fucks" users who gave him personal information. I do not know him personally, but with that one in mind and the privacy issues of Facebook, I find it hard to see how he isn't.
i'm actually struggling to think of an idolized figure in tech who isn't an "asshole"
Maybe not as idolized as Jobs/Gates/Zuck, but there are non-asshole public figures in tech, such as Woz, Tim O'Reilly, Matt Mullenweg, Joel Spolsky. Being abrasive isn't a prerequisite to success.
He has changed recently but he used to be a soulful person who talked openly about his own life. I find that inspiring.
from his blog: (the blog is taken down but this image can still be found on the internet)
http://api.ning.com/files/2B9YJ2tmCwrwvNVAh7nc-3GXR2XCD8LwdS...
I'm going to jump up on my soapbox real quick, because I've been screaming this for a while.
All Kanye West has ever wanted to do is create. If you watch the full interview with Zane Lowe[0], aka the interview that Jimmy Kimmel made fun of and started a whole firestorm over, you realize (if you haven't before) that Kanye sees bringing beauty to others as the penultimate goal in life (you could argue he values his family a bit more). In a sense I think that's what most people who get into startups, or really just "hacking" in general, want to do. Create. Bring beauty. Improve the world in a small way. Leave it better than how you got it, as my dad used to say.
Kanye has also gone through some of the exact trials and tribulations that people trying to start a business go through. If you listen to his song Spaceship[1] from "College Dropout" (his debut album) you can really hear the same kind of ethos as he tries to break into the music business while working at the Gap:
>> Taking my hits, writing my hits
>> Writing my rhymes, playing my mind
>> This fking job can't help him
>> So I quit, y'all welcome
>> Y'all don't know my struggle
>> Y'all can't match my hustle
>> You can't catch my hustle
>> You can't fathom my love dude
>> Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers
>> That's a Different World like Cree Summer's
I'm cherry picking a quote, and it might lose it's umph because of that, but besides the undeniable poetic like quality of his words (is my fanboy showing yet?) you can see the dedication, and the repetition he puts into his craft. This is directly applicable to those trying to get a startup off the ground; You need hard work and most of all you need to ship, and keep on shipping to perfect your product. In fact, when I was trying to get my first startup going I more or less listened to this song on repeat as motivation, because Kanye understands the self-doubt. He understands the constant pressure to succumb to social standards. He understands that people push back when you try and break out. In fact, Kanye probably knows this more than most of us, as a person of color. Yet even through all of this Ye still succeeds. In fact, (it could be argued) the massive amount of people who don't like Kanye are more a testament to his success than the people who do. But it doesn't just stop at music. For those who weren't aware, Kanye started off as a producer and against a lot of pressure to stay a producer became a rapper as well. One of my favorite Kanye songs isn't really a song, but a narrative of how he overcame this and got signed in "Last Call"[2]. As per the same BBC interview I referenced above, Kanye is trying to break into fashion, architecture, design, a myriad of industries using the same ideas and work ethic. Work hard, and make something "dope", while disregarding the way "things are done around here" (to complete the analogy for those less aware of the rap scene, Kanye was one of the founders of "backpack rap", a kind of suburban, every day, introspective way of rapping, as opposed to the massively popular "gangsta rap" of the day).
Beyond all of that one of Kanye's biggest messages throughout his music is that the message of "Stay in your place" is wrong. He is consistently trying to upset the status quo. This is a message that should reverberate among any of us trying to shake up an established industry, or trying to create a market that simply didn't exist before. Kanye sees what is "not cool" in the world and tries to fix that, whether it's jumping up on stage and proclaiming on live tv that Taylor Swift doesn't deserve an award, or using shoe design as a way to break the race barrier in fashion. He's just as much a hacker as any one of us who works with code or hardware.
Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations) and runs his own design company, DONDA. Rumor has it he is financing his stylist's new clothing line. Just because it's not software doesn't mean he's not a VC.
This might not be the most lucid post, as I'm typing rather frantically in order to get this out before the story drops off the front page, but tl;dr: Kanye West exemplifies the hacker spirit, and learning from someone who has succeeded so immensely as a creative person can't be the worst thing you can do.
Yes, this, exactly this. You've said better than I did. He is absolutely, totally a hacker. Pushing the limits. Challenging himself. Challenging the status quo. I was just talking to a friend about this.
You know what somebody's really made of when they have all of the money in the world. Then you watch them and see what happens. Everything Kanye does (at this point) he does because he feels it needs to exist in the world. Another million doesn't mean anything to him. $10 million probably doesn't even mean much to him. He doesn't do it for the money. Unlike lots of musicians, he didn't release 1 or 2 platinum albums and quit. He just keeps going. I align him more closely to somebody like Mark Zuckerberg than, I dunno, Huey? Zuckerberg has billions and just keeps on hacking. Kanye is a hacker through and through.
> Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations)
Did not know this any of this. Wow. Just one more reason to respect Kanye.
Thanks for writing the post, you gave me the impetus to finally spit out what's been rolling around in my head for so long.
Your comparison to Zuck seems very apt... The Black Eyed Peas had a song ("Gone Going") on Elephunk that (rather ironically) talks about an artist that gets famous and rich and falls out of touch with his fans because of that. I've always felt like Kanye has been the antithesis of that image, he continues to make "dopeness" (his word, not mine), and the fact that even his most avant-garde music continues to go platinum is great affirmation of that ideal.
I originally went into an in depth explanation of this in my original post, but decided it was a rabbit trail. Oh well.
Essentially, artists have a lot of "credit" (i.e. they can elicit services for cheap due to the massive exposure it might get), but very little cashflow. They usually pay their living expenses through signing bonuses and use the rest of the contract money to finance the production of the album. In this specific case Kanye used a large amount of his own signing bonus for Late Registration to pay for the videos, while using the bare minimum the studio would give him to pay for just the directors. While theoretically he still would have had a lot of earning potential, and probably would have kept at least some of his "credit" if LR failed, he still would have been extremely cash poor. Kanye frequently talks about how bad he is with money and spending habits, so his financial situation was most likely pretty precarious.
Side note: this is part of the "scam" of record labels... they purposely keep the economic buying power away from the artists' wallet and keep it tied to the artists' image, which just so happens to be very dependent on the studio's continued marketing efforts. Kanye actually addresses this in an interview, where he talks about "who is really free?" when comparing an up and coming artist in a Maybach to a homeless man on the side of the street.
Partially true. Depends on how many millions, I guess. If it was in the low millions, it's definitely not "fuck you money", especially at a relatively young age with 50+ years of life left. It's enough to be comfortable, but I don't know if that's equivalent to "financially set".
Kanye is a really talented, honest, arrogant and immature man. That's why he's so fascinating. He's full of contradictions and he's cool with that, plus he puts that at the forefront of his art.
Some quotes that demostrate this wonderful side of him:
> Golly, more of that bullshit ice rap / I got to 'pologize to Mos and Kweli / But is it cool to rap about gold / If I told the world I copped it from Ghana and Mali?
> Always said if I rapped I'd say something significant / But now I'm rapping 'bout money, hoes, and rims again
> But I ain't even gonna act holier than thou / Cause fuck it, I went to Jacob with twenty-five thou' / Before I had a house and I'd do it again / Cause I want to be on 106 and Park pushing a Benz
Shame that only the arrogant side seems to be displayed on the media, and not his child-like personality...
I completely agree. I think the fact that we reject someone who is so honest with his flaws, and so honest in how he tries to deal with those flaws, says more about our society then it does about Kanye
I feel like the author is projecting a lot of their ideas onto Kanye. Either that, or there's much more evidence for the article in the video, but not quoted in the article.
The latter - I tried to keep the article short and to the point, mentioning several things without quoting directly. The specific quotes are at the bottom of the post.
